Unlikely friends

Sometimes I go through older RAW files in Bridge to search for pictures I overlooked at the time they were taken. I often find a lot of pictures I'd forgotten about or that I dismissed too quickly after the first edit. This is one such image. This is my cocker spaniel, Teddy, making friends with a deer fawn we found under one of our trees and raised in the summer of 2019. I’m sure Teddy was thinking, “I know you’re not a dog, so what exactly are you and why are you in my backyard.” The original background had a fence in it, so I replaced that with a forest image I made out of focus (using Filter > blur > gaussian blur) so it would match the shallow depth of field from the medium telephoto lens I used (188mm). My wife named the fawn Norman. After a couple of months spoiling Norman with the appropriate formulation of milk, raspberries, and other fruit, he jumped our fence and was reunited with his mother. We still see him occasionally, and when my wife calls to him, he is the only deer in the group that raises his head to acknowledge the connection. My settings were 1/1600, f/8, and 1000 ISO.